Suzy Bell On show in Durban
There’s a mighty fine poetic clerk working in the corporation department in Durban, whose head is a-swim with splicing Strauss, Shakespeare, Mozart and Milton, together with baubles and beads collected from Las Vegas, Paris and Durban.
He is performance artist Vernon Burns, who has designed eight highly operatic costumes from Strauss’s Salome: “Such a virginal creature,” sighs Burns, to Delilah, to which Burns so eloquently quotes what Milton ranted: “What thing of sea or land, and female of sex it seems, that so bedecked, ornate and gay comes this way sailing.”
There’s Mozart’s glamorous Queen of the Night seeped in silver evoking sheer Rococo Renaissance. “I gave her silver gloves, as I thought she may get a bit cool in the night,” says the artist, for whom these mannequins, are clearly alive.
It’s taken him seven years to complete his creative costume art project. “I like to call them dramatised soft fabric sculptures,” insists Burns, who dedicated eight months of intense workmanship for each opera-inspired fantasy outfit. “It’s been a journey for me, creating different women in such contrasting disguises. I have subconsciously made them unwearable. I’ve used really heavy fabrics, spent an age on layering fabrics and playing with detail.
“Cleopatra is so ornate, she can hardly move.” This is not Burns’s first “coming out” as he dubs it. This is his third. In his first “costumes at an art exhibition” held in 1982, we had an interpretation of Cleopatra as a nymph. “She was such a seductress in the Eighties. The kinda gal that would have been rolled out from a Persian carpet – naked.
“But now she has matured in the Nineties – it’s the age of liberation for the women who is no longer used and abused. Hence, Cleopatra looks far more elegant, as she is a woman who knows exactly what she wants – and gets it.”
When Burns created Tosca in the Eighties, she was a fiery red-head, an absolute punk, but now, for the artist, Tosca, like Courtney Love, has replaced her fishnets and chunky boots for slipper satin and stilettos. Professor Johan Jacobs of the Department of English, University of Natal-Durban, who opened Burns’s exhibition, “Apres – Moi le Deluge (after me the deluge),” commented that the artist’s work stems from a tradition of profound respect and passion for the art of the costumier, and the art of opera.
At the opening, Burns did a series of elaborate performance pieces with original interpretations of Salome, Donizetti’s Mary Queen of Scots, a fantasy for Delilah, in Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila, and Mozart’s Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, calling down hell’s vengeance on Sarastro.
Burns also transformed into Cleopatra, both Shakespeare’s and Barber’s, to music by Saint-Saens, and then whipped behind a Chinese screen for a quick costume change to enter as Delibes’s Hindu heroine, Lakme, singing her famous temple bell song.
“What was really great for me doing this exhibition was seeing many of my fellow-workers from the corporation in the Durban Art Gallery for the first time. And my make-up artist, Elise van Vuuren, worked at Manpower and now does distance healing, so my opening attracted an interesting range of people. But I, quite content now, no longer have the desire to show. I still have the desire to create, but like Janet Baker, the famous British operatic mezzo soprano, I too, can also say: “No more – this is the end!”
Apres – Moi le Deluge, an exhibition of costume art by Vernon Burns is on at the Durban Art Gallery until the end of September